Colloquium - Peter Onyisi (University of Texas at Austin) - Top Quarks: The New Flavor

The Large Hadron Collider is providing an enormous dataset of proton-proton collisions at the highest energies ever achieved in a laboratory.

With our new ability to study the Higgs boson and the unprecedentedly large sample of top quarks, a new frontier has opened: the flavor physics of the top quark - at heart, the question of how the top quark interacts with the Higgs field. We can start to ask questions such as whether the Higgs field is the unique source of the top quark's mass and whether there are unexpected interactions between the top quark and the Higgs boson. The answers to these will shed light on what may lie beyond the particle physics Standard Model and have cosmological implications.